The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  She dumped the latest armful of garments onto the bed and folded her arms over her chest. “I don’t know what I’m going to feel like wearing. So probably all of them.”

  “Every dress you own.”

  “Every dress. In fact, tomorrow night, we’re going to Saks so I can buy a hundred more dresses. Which one for Saturday night?”

  She held up two more black dresses, a shift and a vintage-looking fit-and-flare.

  I covered my face with my hand. For months, Tom’s girlfriend, Pam, had been obsessed with getting the four of us together for dinner. I’d managed to get out of it on three separate occasions, but the time had come. It was finally happening.

  “I don’t know why you hate her,” Catherine said. “Which dress?”

  “I don’t hate her.”

  “Then why the dramatic gesture?”

  “I just don’t like her that much.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Hardly.”

  “She’s nice.”

  “Yes.” I frowned at that word: nice. Pam was nice, but I wasn’t, and never had been. You could stand to be a little nicer, my father told me the last time we talked before he died. You’re a girl. You have to be nice. But not too fucking nice. “I just don’t think she really gets him.”

  “What is there to get? He’s a guy.”

  I didn’t want to talk about the matter anymore. “Come here,” I said.

  “I’m busy.”

  “Come here.”

  The corners of her mouth tipped up. “I already came there. As did you.” But she flipped the suitcase closed and lay down next to me.

  “I’m just going to miss you. Sue me.”

  “Oh I will.” Catherine scooted over until her back was curled against me. I fluffed the duvet over her and slipped an arm over her hip. “I’ll take you for every penny you’re worth.”

  I didn’t say anything, just breathed in the smell of her.

  “It’s only four days. Three sleeps.”

  “I suppose you won’t miss me at all.”

  “Maybe a little.” She rolled over and kissed me. Her mouth was full and soft and every time we kissed it felt like the first time. A kiss like that made it easy to forget everything else, at least for a few moments.

  FOUR

  Later, when she was asleep and I wasn’t, I thought about scribbling a note and tucking it into her suitcase: something cute and sweet that would make her want to jump on a plane to come home as soon as she found it. But I didn’t really do cute, or sweet, and Catherine would never jump on a plane for anybody, except herself. Part of me wanted to ask her to stay. But the rest of me wanted her to want to stay, not because I said I needed her, but because she knew I did. If I did. Being with Catherine was like spending money you don’t have: a dazzling thrill in the moment, bookended by uneasy weirdness before and after.

  I decided not to think about it anymore and got out of bed and put my clothes back on. In Catherine’s dark kitchen, I got a glass of water from the sink and gazed out the window above it as I drank; the wide backyard was pristine with undisturbed snow. At my apartment, the fenced-in postage stamp that constituted a yard was always dotted with the footprints of people and animals coming and going. That probably should have unsettled me, but I found it comforting—proof that life continued all around us. Here, the isolation was what left me feeling unsettled.

  Then again, when I was at home, I always found something else to unsettle me there too.

  I leaned over the counter and closed my eyes for a minute, nearly jumping out of my skin when my phone began vibrating across the counter. Another middle-of-the-night call from my brother.

  “Okay,” he said when I answered, “this is weird.”

  I sat down at the kitchen table and slowed my breathing. “So this is one of those calls.”

  “I came over to Nightshade, and it’s closed.”

  “Closed?”

  “Like, unexpectedly closed. The doors are locked. People have been coming up, trying to get in, and leaving.”

  “No sign?”

  “Nothing.”

  * * *

  Andrew stood on the sidewalk in front of the place—a hulking warehouse with a neon sign above the door: NIGHTSHADE LOUNGE. The sign cast a sickly yellow glow on the brick façade and the sidewalk below, which gave the impression that it should be open. Then again, the Wonder Bread building a few blocks south had left its sign lit up for years after the factory closed.

  The place had no windows, just a black metal door and an empty poster frame mounted beside it. There was moisture trapped behind the pane of Plexiglas in the frame, along with a torn scrap of whatever poster had previously occupied it. WELL DRINKS $2 12AM–

  It was pretty uninviting, even for kids looking for a bar that wouldn’t check IDs; a giant brick building with no windows seemed sort of like a horror movie waiting to happen. We made a lap around the perimeter but encountered no signs of life, no signs posted that the place would be temporarily closed today, no police seals to indicate that Nightshade had been shut down again for any reason.

  “Well, okay,” I said.

  “Now what?”

  I shook my head. “We still have the burnt eggs as an angle.”

  Andrew yawned and pushed his hands into his pockets. “Remember when we used to come to places like this?”

  “I’d like to think we were a little more discerning than this.”

  “Everyone would like to think that. But we were kids.”

  He had a point, and I did remember. The days when we just wanted to be somewhere cheap and hot and noisy to drown out the quiet in our heads. Bernie’s, Long Street Lounge, Victory’s, Little Brothers and the Carlile Club, most of which were gone now, sacrificed to the gods of high-rise apartments. It was a miracle nothing worse than a three-day hangover ever happened to me back in those days.

  Whenever I thought about whiskey, I thought about my dad. And whenever I thought about him, I thought about how he was gone and we were all still just as lost, under the surface, like grief was an abscess, walled off but roiling. And that just made me think about whiskey again, repeating the whole cycle. The end result was that I thought about both, constantly. “Do you think we should do something on the eighth?” I said.

  Andrew required no explanation to understand that I was talking about the anniversary of Frank’s death. “No. I don’t know. It’s going to be a horrible day. It’s never going to be anything other than a horrible day.”

  “We should go with Mom to Greenlawn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And get flowers and stuff.”

  “Yeah. So what’s your question? You already have it figured out.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. “I don’t want to be the one to bring it up. Like, hey, Mom, it’s a beautiful day to go to the cemetery, what do you think?”

  “Well,” Andrew said, “it’s not like she forgot what day it is. I don’t think it requires a ruse. Besides, she’ll probably bring it up first. Or just go without us.”

  “Strangely,” I said, “that does not make me feel any better.”

  “You’re in a mood.”

  “No, I’m just—never mind.”

  “Go home. Get some sleep. Thanks for your help. Sorry for the dramatics,” Andrew said.

  “Hey, no.”

  He hugged me quickly around the shoulders and set off across Fourth. When he reached his side of the street, he called out to me, “Go home.”

  “I’m going, I’m going.”

  But instead I got back in the car and sat there in the cold for a while, watching Andrew’s silhouette blur into nothing. I couldn’t quite see his building from back here, thanks to the cars parked along Fourth and a massive drift of snow deposited at the curb by a halfhearted snowplow attempt at some point. But it couldn’t have been more than a three-minute walk. I was parked on the left edge of the one-way street, the long brick side of Nightshade hulking up beside me. On the other side of Fourth:
a row of porchless brick town houses with three floors that somehow came together to look like an elementary school. I could remember when there was nothing more than a vacant lot from here to the freeway back when Andrew moved in. Now there was a whole community; they’d even named the little alleys that had never been given real names before. Directly across from me, the street was called Neruda, an oddly poetic moniker for a roadway that was still very much a construction zone on Google Maps satellite view. I looked at the cars parked up and down the street. Was Addison’s among them?

  It was too dark to see.

  I used my phone to look at Nightshade’s Facebook page again. Three people had “checked in” as recently as last night, posting badly lit, drunken photos full of raised glasses and smeary smiles, meaning that the club had been open twenty-four hours ago. There were no announcements indicating a planned closure here either.

  In the past, when I’d been hired to find someone, the person was almost always fine. Just busy, maybe actively avoiding a nosy relative or a shitty boss, but not missing. Missing wasn’t the same thing as not here. Sarah Cook had been the exception, trapped in that nightmare house. But it wasn’t like I was going to have another case like that, so why was I so uneasy about Addison? Was this what getting older was like—being reminded by every young person you encounter that it’s something of a miracle you’re still alive?

  I was knee-deep in thoughts like that when I heard the sound of shoes crunching over snow, a split second before ungloved knuckles rapped sharply on my window. I snapped my head to the window, saw only a dark coat over a broad torso and the glint of a handgun. “Roxane Weary,” a familiar voice said.

  He stepped back and leaned down, one forearm on the roof of my car—tall, buzz cut, with a face I realized I’d last seen eight months earlier, also in darkness, during the shootout in the Capitol Square building. It was Vincent Pomp’s bodyguard, Bo.

  In the scant moonlight, I could see his eyes narrowing. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I heard this place has great well drink specials,” I said. “What are you doing here?” Then I remembered what Andrew had told me about this place. A sleazy dance club would fit quite nicely under the Phoenix Group’s umbrella of businesses. “Is he here?”

  But the big man shook his head. “It’s fuckin’ cold out here. Let’s talk inside.”

  * * *

  The interior of Nightshade seemed to be as uninviting as the outside, just a big black rectangle with a bar on one wall and a damp, murky smell. It wasn’t quite as cold as it was on the street, but it also wasn’t much better. We felt around in the dark for the light switches and failed at finding them; finally, Bo gave up and just led the way over to the bar using the light from his phone. “What do you drink?” he said.

  “Whatever’s handy.”

  He leaned across the bar and grabbed a nearly empty bottle of Old Crow and two glasses.

  “So this is the latest Phoenix Group investment, then?” I said.

  He poured himself a drink and pushed the bottle to me, and I did the same. Old Crow was worse than I remembered, though that didn’t stop me from drinking it.

  “Owner took out a loan with Mr. Pomp,” Bo said. “A large loan.”

  “Ah. So not an investment, per se.”

  “Mr. Pomp just wants his money back. Once that happens, he won’t be involved in this shithole any longer.” Bo smirked. With his face illuminated from below by his cell phone, his features were stony and intimidating. “So what are you doing here?”

  The solidarity during our search for the light switches had made me almost forget that he was a dangerous individual. I took a few steps away, casually. “There’s a young woman who I think may have been working here,” I said. “I’m just trying to find her.”

  Bo visibly relaxed. “Who is she?”

  “A deejay.”

  “Well, I don’t know the staff so I can’t really help with that.”

  “So why’s the place closed?”

  “Great question.”

  “Not supposed to be?”

  He finished his drink, frowning at the taste. “Since the place reopened, we’ve had an arrangement. Every night at two, I come by for Mr. Pomp’s take from the register.”

  “So you’re not just a driver anymore.”

  “No.”

  “Promotion?”

  “I’m glad you’re so interested in my career path.”

  “So what is Mr. Pomp’s take?”

  Bo didn’t say anything.

  “Okay, so every night at two…”

  “And tonight, the doors are locked, nobody’s home.”

  “Why?”

  He gestured at the dark, empty space. “Like I know? There’s no one here, except you and that guy. Who was he?”

  “My brother.”

  Bo shook his head. “Your whole family is like this, then?”

  “Who runs this place, day-to-day?”

  He frowned, like he was debating whether he wanted to give me any more information.

  I said, “I think I proved myself to be a person of my word, last year. I think Mr. Pomp would agree.”

  Finally, he said, “Look, all I know is I’m supposed to come in and get the cash—it’s always in a zippered pouch in the back. I take it. That’s it.”

  “Every night.”

  “Every night.”

  “Wednesday night?”

  “Every night.”

  “Anything out of the ordinary that night?”

  “It’s the same every night.”

  “Including Wednesday night?”

  “Are you deaf?”

  “I’m just being thorough,” I said. “I’d like to talk to your boss tomorrow.”

  Bo picked up his phone and motioned toward the back door with it, marking the end of the conversation. “He has a secretary,” he said, “and I’m not her.”

  FIVE

  Shelby was working the counter at the Angry Baker when I got there later that morning, patiently waiting while a man talking on his phone listed every variety of muffin to whoever was on the other end. She shot me a smile and tried to get his attention. “Sir, maybe if you could … sir…” But I shook my head and pointed at the carrot muffin I usually got and handed over a five-dollar bill.

  “Keep the change,” I whispered so as to not interrupt the Muffin Man’s conversation.

  Shelby beamed at me. “I’m making chili tonight, you should come by.”

  I gave her a thumbs-up as I took the paper sack containing my muffin from her hand. She lived upstairs from me now, which was excellent news as far as my prospects for actual dinner food went. With her addition to the building, the queer quotient among tenants was also now three to one, since Alejandro, with whom I shared a wall, was gay as well. But, as I had to remind them, Shelby also brought the average age in the building way, way down.

  Muffin and more tea in hand, I headed to Tamarack Circle to visit Vincent Pomp and his secretary at the office of the Phoenix Group. For all the entanglement I’d had with them last summer, I’d never actually been to the office. It was located in an ugly brick building of brutalist inspiration on the northeast quadrant of the massive roundabout. The parking lot hadn’t been cleared of ice and snow since winter started so the terrain was jagged and uneven. I picked my way across, grateful for the tread on my warm Sorel boots. I went into the lobby, which was empty in an abandoned sort of way. A bronze plaque on the wall told me that Pomp’s office was on the second floor next to a periodontist. I personally would not want to expose my gums to anyone in a building like this, but to each their own. I climbed the steps and found the office and pushed open the door to a narrow waiting area with an unattended receptionist’s desk at the front. I looked down the hall past it, saw nothing but closed doors, and heard nothing at all.

  A silver bell sat on the counter. I waited a good two minutes before pressing it, not wanting to fill the office with the cheery, out-of-place ding. Then, finally, I tapped it with
an index finger; even though I was bracing myself for the horror of the sound, it was loud enough to startle me. Almost immediately, a door at the end of the hall snapped open and a woman stuck her head out.

  Her hair was disheveled, escaping from her updo, and the large bow on her blouse was askew.

  So this must be the secretary.

  “Hi there,” I said. “I’m hoping to speak with Mr. Pomp. Is he in?”

  She patted at her hair and clothing like she was on fire. “Mr. Pomp, ah, no, do you have an appointment?”

  “Nope,” I said, cheery as the bell on her desk, “but I think he’ll want to talk to me. Roxane Weary.”

  Next I heard the low rumble of a man’s voice from the room behind her. She nodded, closed the door, and strode down the hallway toward me, still adjusting her clothing. She wore stilettos that had to be a bitch to walk in on the berber carpet. But she managed it with grace and took a seat behind the counter where I was standing. Only after she stapled a few things together and logged in to her computer did she say, “Mr. Pomp will see you now. Last door on the right.”

  She still hadn’t looked at me.

  I went down the same hallway and knocked on Pomp’s door.

  “Yes?” he said.

  I almost laughed. I pushed the door open and stepped in. “So we’re just going to pretend you weren’t just in here fucking your secretary.”

  Pomp was seated at his desk, leaning far back in his executive chair, his hands laced over his chest. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” he said. “Haven’t you heard of calling first?”

  I sat down on the other side of his desk. “I did call. Three times, actually. But I don’t think you hired Pussy Bow out there because of her telephony skills.”

  Pomp’s mouth twitched. “You’re in fine spirits these days. Interestingly, I don’t feel the same about whatever your involvement is in my club.”

  “Bo filled you in.”

  Pomp nodded.

  “So it’s not like you’re surprised to see me, then.”

  He smoothed his tie but didn’t say anything. Clearly he wasn’t going to make anything easy this time around either.